February 05, 2017

Decision Making On Software Development Projects

Decision Making on Software Development ProjectsIs Both Simple and Complex at the Same Time

All projects operate in the presence of uncertainty.

Real-world decision making is performed under uncertainty.

Decision makers must make decisions which best incorporate these uncertainties.

These uncertainties come in two forms – reducible (I can do something about it) and irreducible (I can't do anything about it).

Irreducible (Aleatory) uncertainty is the natural variability of the processes and technology on the project. These are stochastic, they may be nonstationary, and are due to chance from the underlying statistical distributions.

Aleatory uncertainties are modeled as random variables described by statistical distributions (Triangle is a common one when the actual distribution is not known) In aleatory uncertainty, decision makers make assumptions about the distribution's descriptive statistics - the Mean and Variance are needed along with the Most Likely (Mode) at a minimum. The shape of the curve is needed as well.

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Decision Making on Software Development ProjectsIs Both Simple and Complex at the Same Time

All projects operate in the presence of uncertainty.

Real-world decision making is performed under uncertainty.

Decision makers must make decisions which best incorporate these uncertainties.

These uncertainties come in two forms – reducible (I can do something about it) and irreducible (I can't do anything about it).

Irreducible (Aleatory) uncertainty is the natural variability of the processes and technology on the project. These are stochastic, they may be nonstationary, and are due to chance from the underlying statistical distributions.

Aleatory uncertainties are modeled as random variables described by statistical distributions (Triangle is a common one when the actual distribution is not known) In aleatory uncertainty, decision makers make assumptions about the distribution's descriptive statistics - the Mean and Variance are needed along with the Most Likely (Mode) at a minimum. The shape of the curve is needed as well.